Beat the Reaper

by Josh Bazell

  What homey do play is getting back to Squillante’s room. And either killing him or figuring out what to do about him instead.

  There doesn’t seem to be an obvious choice. If I let him live, and he tells David Locano where I am, I’m either dead or on the run. On the other hand, supposedly I work at a hospital to make up for killing people.

  Or something along those lines.

  “Sir?” It’s a small voice behind me. I turn.

  My medical students. Two cups of human misery in short white coats. One is male and the other one female, and they both have names. That’s all I can ever remember about them.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir. I work for a living,” I say. “Go check labs.”

  This mostly confuses them, but one of them says, “We already did.”

  “Then just stay here.”

  “But—”

  “Sorry, kids. I’ll teach you something later.* And I’ll see you at Attending Rounds at seven thirty.”

  Of course, ten feet farther on I get beeped by Akfal, who’s in the Intensive Care Unit. “You got a minute?” he says when I phone him back.

  Instead of “No,” I say, “Is it serious?” Which is a stupid question, since Akfal wouldn’t page me if it wasn’t. He doesn’t have that kind of time.

  “I need your help on a thoracostomy.”

  Fuck. “I’ll be right there,” I tell him.

  I turn back to my med students. “Change of plans, kids,” I tell them. “Uncle Akfal’s got a procedure for us.”

  As we head toward the fire stairs, one of the med students nods nervously back toward the code. “Isn’t that our patient, sir?”

  “She’s God’s patient now.”

  Thoracostomy is just sticking a sharpened tube through someone’s chest wall. You do it when the amount of blood—or pus, or air, or whatever—in their thorax is starting to compress one or both lungs, making it difficult for the person to breathe. You have to avoid the key organs—lungs, spleen, liver—and the undersides of the ribs, since the undersides are where the vein, artery, and nerve run. (You can see this on a rack of ribs, even after it’s been cooked. Then you can go yack.) But otherwise placing a chest tube is simple, as long as the patient’s holding still.

  Which is never. That’s where I come in. Though it gives me no joy to admit it, the medical task I perform nearest to perfection is holding people down. My med students are about to get a rare glimpse of genius.

  So I’m surprised when we get to the Intensive Care Unit to find the patient canted over on his side, with his eyes open and his tongue hanging out. In fact I’m worried he died while Akfal was phoning me, but then I feel the patient’s carotid and it’s pulsing fine, though there’s no indication he can feel me checking. “Was he like this before?” I ask.

  Akfal’s setting up a procedure table, using all Martin Whiting Aldomed materials. “Apparently he’s always like this. Massive CVA* six years ago.”

  “So what do you need us for?”

  “Chart says he’s capable of sudden violent movements.”

  I tap the guy’s eyeball. No response. “Somebody’s bullshitting you. The guy’s a lawsuit Barbie.”

  “Probably.” He opens a pack of Dermagels onto the blue paper tablecloth he’s set up, then pulls them on one at a time, touching only the insides with his skin. “Ready,” he says.

  I crank the bed up, and each med student takes a leg. I untie the guy’s gown and let it drop to his waist. The guy is saggy with coma fat.

  Akfal iodine-sponges a patch on the lower left ribcage, then picks up the tube. I throw an arm across the top of the guy’s chest and arms.

  Akfal jabs. The patient screams and boots both med students off his legs so hard they hit the walls. One of them also knocks over some kind of monitor.

  But the tube is in. In what is up for debate, since the fluid that sprays out—and across Akfal’s chest and face before he can grab up a bedpan to deflect it—looks like dark, ropy blood. After a couple of moments it begins to pulse out normally.

  The patient sighs and relaxes again in my arms. “Kids, you all right?” I say.

  “Yes, sir,” they both say, shaky.

  “Akfal?”

  “Lovely. Watch out: there’s blood on the floor.”

  Later, when the students and I emerge from the ICU, we get stopped by a guy who looks just like a younger, less zombified version of the patient.

  “How’s my dad?” he says.

  “He’s doing great,” I tell him.

  In the fire stairs, headed back up, I say:

  “What’s the lesson, kids?”

  “DNR,” they say in unison.

  “Damn straight.”

  The Do Not Resuscitate order. The for-Christ’s-sake-let-me-die request.

  Which, if doctors explained it to their patients and patients signed it, might rescue a U.S. healthcare system that now spends 60 percent of its funds on people who will never see the outside of a hospital.

  Think that’s doing the Reaper’s work? Newsflash: by that point, the Reaper’s work is done. “Brain death” doesn’t mean the brain is dead, although it is. It means the brain’s so gone that the body is effectively dead. The patient’s beating heart might as well be in a vat.

  Speaking of not doing the Reaper’s work, I decide to head back to Squillante’s room, certain now that I will do everything possible to scare him into silence before I even think about killing him.

  Pretty certain, anyway. I send the kids ahead to Attending Rounds—an event so loathsome that even under the circumstances I feel guilty for not getting them out of it—just in case.

  Sure enough, though, when I get there, Squillante’s talking on a cell phone.

  “I’ll be off in a minute,” he says to me, covering the mouthpiece. “What am I, a fuckin dinosaur, I don’t know how to use a cell phone?”

  Then he holds up a finger and talks into the phone again. “Jimmy,” he says. “I gotta call you back. The Bearclaw’s here right now.”

  4

  In movies hitmen always use a silenced .22, which they drop at the scene. Dropping your gun at the scene I understood, since Michael drops his gun at the scene in The Godfather, a movie from the 1970s about the 1950s that mob guys model their lives on to this day.* When I first started thinking about it, though, using a .22 seemed idiotic.

  Obviously, smaller bullets tend to go faster, and speed is the primary component of kinetic energy, and hence of the shock waves that a well-placed bullet will send through your body fluids until the walls meant to keep them apart dissolve. But the amount of kinetic energy that actually gets transferred from a bullet to a body is difficult to calculate, since it relies on things like rotational speed and “impulse,” which is what physicists call the amount of time two objects actually spend in contact.

  Conservation of momentum, on the other hand, is easy to do the math on. For example, if a bullet weighing 230 grains (15 grams, the weight of a .45 bullet, which is 45 percent of an inch across) goes from the speed of sound (slow for a bullet) to a complete stop inside your body (much easier to achieve with a big bullet than a small one), then 15 grams of your body has to accelerate to the speed of sound to make up for it. Or 150 grams of your body to one-tenth the speed of sound, and so on. It’s much less demanding to think about.

  I told the geek at the Nassau Coliseum Gun Show, which I’d read about in Shoot the Jew Weekly, or Blow Your Own Brains Out or whatever, that I wanted twin .45 automatics.

  That was the easy part. The guns I ended up buying looked cheesy—they had walnut grips and barrels so shiny they looked mirrored—but they were solid, with clean actions, and I figured I could always paint them later. Plus, wooden grips supposedly absorb some recoil.

  The hard part was buying the silencers.

  Just possessing a silencer has been a felony since the Vietnam War. I’m not sure why this is so. True, silencers are only used to kill people, but you could say the same thin
g about assault rifles, and the NRA keeps them cheap and easy. At the gun show I had to walk around for hours after I’d bought the guns before anyone took the bait.

  This was a white-haired guy with glasses and a polyester shirt. Not survivalist-looking in the least, though he had all the signs out on his table: memoirs of high-ranking Nazis, weird guns and knives. I asked him if he had any suppressors.

  A suppressor is a half-assed version of a silencer you use on your assault rifle, so you don’t go deaf when you’re gunning down your classmates or whatever.

  “Suppressors for what?” he said. When he stopped talking his tongue, which was gray, rested on his lower lip.

  “Sidearm,” I said.

  “Sidearm? You don’t suppress a sidearm.”

  “I’m looking for some very strong suppressors,” I said.

  “Very strong suppressors.”

  “Very quiet suppressors,” I said.

  He looked annoyed. “I look like a Fed to you?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Then speak your mind. What kind of ammo you lookin to use?”

  “Magnum load hollow-points.”

  “For serious?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Them the guns?”

  “Yeah.” I handed over the shopping bag I was carrying. He pulled the two pistols out and laid them on a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For a moment he just stared at them. “Hmm,” he finally said. “That’s not so easy. But come around back.”

  I went around the table to where there was an extra folding chair. The gun maniac picked a fishing-tackle box up off the floor and opened it under the skirt of the tablecloth. It was packed with silencers.

  “Hmm,” he said, digging through them. “You need one for each?”

  “Yes.”

  He pulled a couple out. “Don’t know how good these are,” he said.

  They were long—easily a foot, with six inches of thick tube attached to six inches of thin tube. “What is that?” I said, pointing to the thin part.

  “It’s a barrel. Watch this.” In about ten seconds, entirely out of sight, he stripped one of my automatics down and built it back up. Only, instead of the original barrel, which he left lying on the table, the barrel that was part of the silencer was now integrated into the gun. “That way you can swap out and they can’t match the bullets,” he said. “Course, you want to make the shells impossible to trace, you got to switch out the breechblock. Sand it down, at least.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Keep the original in the weapon when you’re not using it, case the Feds come. And keep it loaded, too, case they come all hinky.” He winked, though that may have been a tic. “You hear me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good. That’ll be four hundred dollars.”

  Around the middle of December 1992, Mrs. Locano said, “Pietro, what do you want for Christmas?” and I decided to make my move. We were all at dinner.

  “I’m Jewish,” I said.

  “Oh please.”

  “The only thing I ever think about wanting,” I said, staring at David Locano, “is to know who killed my grandparents.”

  Everyone fell silent. I thought: All this. And I’ve fucked it up.

  And when it seemed to just blow over, I was grateful.

  But a few days later David Locano called me and asked if I would come with him to Big 5 Sporting Goods to find a Christmas present for Skinflick. He’d come pick me up.

  We went. He got Skinflick a speed bag, which was ridiculous—Skinflick couldn’t hold his hands above his head for ten minutes without having to punch something at the same time— but Locano didn’t really seem to want my advice.

  In the car on the way home, he said, “How serious are you about getting the scumbags who killed your grandparents?”

  It surprised the shit out of me so badly I couldn’t say anything for about a minute.

  “That’s pretty much why I’m alive,” I finally said.

  “That is so fucking stupid,” he said. “I know it’s why you went to Sandhurst,* and why you became friends with Adam. But it’s bullshit. You can back off of it. You should back off it. And I know you want to.”

  “What happens to me if I don’t?”

  Locano swerved to the side of the street we were on and slammed on the brakes.

  “Cut the tough guy crap,” he said. “I don’t threaten people. I’m a lawyer, for fuck’s sake. And if I did threaten people, I wouldn’t threaten you.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’m just telling you—you’ve got a lot to live for. And to stay out of trouble for. Adam loves you. He respects you. You should listen to that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you hearing me?”

  “Yes.”

  I was, but I was still stunned.

  “And you’re stuck to this thing?”

  “Yes.”

  He sighed. Nodded. “All right, then.” He reached into his jacket.

  I almost stopped him. I was thirteen months into eight hours a day of martial arts training. It would have been easy to block his gun arm, push his chin till his neck broke.

  “Relax yourself,” he said. He pulled out his appointment book and a pen. “I’m gonna see if I can get you a contract.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll see if I can hook it up for someone to pay you to do this.”

  “I won’t take money for it.”

  He looked at me. “Yes you will. Otherwise you’re a rogue, and they’ll put you down like a dog. We’ll start a rumor that whoever these scumbags are, they’re talking too much—bringing down more heat than they’re worth. Maybe they’re someone’s nephew’s nephews or something, but it shouldn’t take too much. Are you understanding this?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good. Are you gonna need a gun?”

  They were brothers. Joe and Mike Virzi. Like the cops had thought, they’d done it to get jumped into the mob.

  I didn’t just take Locano’s word for it. For one thing I followed them, for weeks.

  The Virzi brothers were a pair of violent dicks who got crazed with boredom pretty much nightly, then took it out on whoever they could find. They’d pull some poor schmuck out of a nightclub or a pool hall or whatever by the hair, telling everybody else to shut the fuck up, this was mob business, then leave the guy in a puddle of teeth and blood out in the alley. Sometimes they’d beat the guy to the point where it looked like he was going to get maimed or killed, or they’d pick a woman, and I’d have to anonymously call the cops.

  Here’s the weird part: I watched them get made. I was following them pretty much every night, but it still surprised me when it happened.

  It was in a Temple of St. Anthony, in the basement of the activities building attached to a church in Paramus. You could see in through the bars of the sunken window, which was open to let the heat out. There were three shitty buffet tables set up in a “U,” with old mobsters seated around it and Joe and Mike Virzi standing in the center naked, repeating after the geezer in the middle.

  I couldn’t hear too much of it, but there were parts in Italian, Latin, and English, and the Virzis kept promising to go to hell if they betrayed the mafia. At one point a couple of geezers from the ends of the table, looking particularly ridiculous with medallions and felt hats on, set slips of paper on fire and dropped them onto the Virzis’ palms. I tried this at home later. It didn’t hurt at all.

  The squalidness of the whole thing enraged me. I couldn’t believe my grandparents had died for this bullshit. I left before it ended to go drive by the Virzis’ house.

  It was a little one-story with an attached garage. As usual when they were out, the garage door was open.

  Cause who was gonna rob them?

  The next morning before school—it was early March, and it was freezing out—I went into the woods near Saddle River to practice shooting, and found out why hitmen use .22’s.

  The first
shot out of each gun sounded like someone slamming a stapler closed. The second sounded like the warning bark of a dog. The sixth and seventh sounded like low-flying jets, and by that time the insides of both silencers were actually on fire, with black smoke and blue flames coming out of the barrels. The paint on the barrels was bubbling.

  Still, the work those bullets did was intriguing. The one time I managed to land shots from both my right hand and my left hand on a single tree trunk—not so easy when the kick made it feel like I was hauling myself up a swimming pool ladder every time I pulled the triggers—there were four-inch chips in the bark where the bullets had gone in.

  And two-foot satellite dishes of sawdust out back.

  I chose a weekend right before spring break of my junior year.

  I’d rebuilt my silencers. I’m not particularly anxious to divulge how to do this, but suffice to say that it helps to already have the metal cylinders, as well as some fiberglass insulation and a stack of full-inch washers. And that, even in the days before the Internet, it wasn’t too hard to find instructions.

  I knew the Virzis never locked the door between their garage and their kitchen. I’d been through it a dozen times, been through the whole scumbag house, with all its Cindy Crawford posters and prints by that guy who did the covers of the Duran Duran albums.

  On the night I’d decided to kill them I followed them to a club, then went to their house and locked the kitchen door. Then I stood to one side of the open garage door and waited for them to come home.

  A professor of mine in med school claimed that the sweat glands of your armpits and the sweat glands of your groin are controlled by entirely separate parts of your nervous system, so that it’s nervousness that makes your armpits sweat, while it’s heat that makes your groin sweat. I don’t know if this is true or not, but I can tell you that standing waiting for the Virzis to get back I dropped enough sweat from both my groin and my armpits to fill my shoes. My entire body was slick inside my stifling overcoat. The heat and the nervousness were hard to tell apart.

  Eventually there was a bang on the sidewalk and the Virzis’ racing-stripe Mustang heaved into the garage beside me, putting out a wave of hot exhaust and rubber.